Black and White Digital Photography

Black and White Digital Photography, is from now on the road forks, and if you do so technically, the greater the qualitative difference. To dispense of color means loosing some of the realism of vision. The enormous diffusion of black and white in the media, in spite of the unstoppable rise of color, is due probably to technical or economic reasons (it's easier, faster and cheaper). Nevertheless, it is maintained in publications, movies and television for another reason: a black and white image can be just as valid as a color one; black and white is not better nor worse that color, it is simply different , and everybody accepts it.

The emulsion only registers the brightness of every point in the image. The film of a camera is panchromatic : the different colors give place to different densities of gray according to its apparent brightness. We know that a black and white film has those precise tones as extremes of a range of different densities of gray ( tonal range ): black corresponds to underexposure (transparency in the negative) and white corresponds to overexposure (maximum density).

If we're working with paint we can obtain different grays by mixing the base colors. Before starting to paint, it would be necessary to assign the different tones to there corresponding zones of the scene. When painting, one can do whatever you want with a number of tones and greater or lesser exactitude than the corresponding. For example, if a painter (in black and white) would want to reduce the contrast of a determined scene, he wouldn't have to do more than use similar tones of gray; if what he's meaning is to was to accentuate the contrast, he'd intensively use black and white. A painter isn't limited to things like

overexposure or underexposure because he can represent what he sees in the world in whatever way it suits him: if he wants to reproduce a very contrasted scene, the correspondence between brightness and the tones can be modified with no problem.

In photography, on the other hand, the conversion of a scale of brightness to a range of densities is governed by the characteristics of the emulsion and the development. This is what decides how the correspondence is made between brightness and density and those who mark what we can and can't do.

Black and White Negative

The black and white negative let us obtain copies on paper. The difference between one and the other is very narrow. We can't get a quality print from a negative that is, once developed, of mediocre quality. The consequences of using a negative resound almost directly on the positive image. W e know that the main identification sign of a negative is it's sensitivity. Depending on it, the other three main characteristics of a negative vary: the contrast, the exposure latitude and the grain.